Martha laughed. “Darcie, your father’s been dead fourteen years, and he never dug in manure in his life. I’ve always done most of the yard work, when he was alive and after. He wasn’t interested.”
Of course Gordon Barrett wouldn’t have done yard work. Darcie couldn’t imagine him lifting a shovel. But then, she couldn’t imagine her mother doing it, either. How had she missed that all these years?
She blinked, looked at her mother again, not as her mother, but as a woman. Say, a woman she’d encountered in her police duties. What would her impression be then?
Attractive. Of course.
Fit. Sure.
Intelligent. Yeah, she supposed so, though she’d never really thought about it before.
Capable.
Capable. The woman standing before her had a definite air of being able to handle things. And… Oh, my God. A restrained sensuality.
Who was this woman?
Martha Barrett.
Her mother.
“Darcie? Is something wrong?”
Darcie opened her mouth to demand answers, to find solutions to puzzles, to holler, Who are you? All that came out was “Thanks for taking care of the vegetarian plates.”
The dispatcher’s call interrupted an entirely uneventful half shift filling in for Benny. Darcie practically sobbed out her thanks to Corine for the distraction. Between thoughts about her mother and thoughts about Zeke, Darcie had been about to go nuts.
“Mildred Magnus saw lights on in the high school again. She says they’re not moving this time,” Corine reported. “That’s got her real rattled.”
Ever since the paper had printed some legend about the hill the high school was built on having once been a campground for Native Americans, Mildred had decided spirits of the dead came back to light their campfires.
Very adaptable spirits, apparently, since they used electric lights.
Darcie acknowledged the call and drove across town.
The orange sports car was parked by the side entrance to the 1970s addition to the venerable original building of Drago High School. Great.
It was almost certain Zeke was the source of Mildred’s lights. But almost wasn’t certain enough to make Darcie forget caution.
It wouldn’t be the first time Zeke had slipped into the building after hours. She could think of at least three times when Mr. Grandhier had refused to let Zeke do some experiment in eleventh grade that Zeke had his heart set on. Back then, Darcie had volunteered—like a sap—to be his lookout.
This time she would roust him out. She would have preferred wrestling with a rabid dog. It would have posed less threat to her emotional well-being.
The lab door was ajar. Light arrowed across the floor. She drew a breath, and eased the door wider.
Zeke sat at his old seat at the lab table, a battery-powered lantern beside him. He seemed to be staring at the huge poster of the Periodic Table of the Elements.
“Hi, Darcie,” he said without turning.
She stifled surprise. “I didn’t think you heard me.”
“I didn’t. I smelled you.”
She was not going to ask what on earth he meant by that, or why he sounded so almighty pleased with himself. She was here to do her job.
“You’ve frightened some of the neighbors. Light bobbing around the hallways has fired up overactive imaginations. You need to leave, Zeke.”
He didn’t move. He seemed weary. She wanted to close the distance between them and stroke his hair.
It made her next words staccato. “It’s late. Your mother’ll be worried.”
“Bingo night.” His mouth twisted. “I remembered this time. But I’m not used to anybody keeping track of me, except my assistant, and she’s used to me working all night.”
“Is that what you were doing, Zeke? Working?”
“No. Trying to remember that once upon a time I did get some work done.” He spun around on the stool to face her. “I feel like I’ve forgotten how to work. When I’m not smothered in lilacs, Ma’s letting a cast of thousands troop through the house. Letting? What am I saying? She’s practically dragging them in off the street.”
“You need to take a break.” So they weren’t going to talk about what had happened this afternoon. That was good. Better than good. She was on duty. Even if she’d wanted to talk about it, which she didn’t, she couldn’t. But he could have. He’d been the instigator after all. “To connect with people.”
He twisted a grin at her. “People are vastly overrated.”
She didn’t grin back. “You use work to avoid people, Zeke.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it, then said, “No, I don’t,” as he switched off the lantern.
“You always have. You used to try to do it to me in chem lab.”
For the moment they were both blind, stuck in place, waiting for the memory of the lantern to stop strobing and for their eyes to adjust to the dim light coming through the blinds.
“I like to work. That doesn’t mean anything other than I like my work.”
He was crossing the area between them, cautiously, slowly. She backed into the hall, a deeper shade of dark than the classroom.
“When I used to try to talk to you in class, at the beginning, you’d dive into work like some men dive into the newspaper to avoid conversation at breakfast.”
“I was interested in it.” He closed the door behind him, cutting off even that patch of dimness. Both of them held still again, reacclimating.
“And didn’t want to talk to me.”
“I didn’t know you. Then.” His voice was low. They were almost whispering, as if the darkness demanded that.
She backed up another step. “Yes, you were interested in your work, but you lost yourself behind it. You withdrew behind it. I see you doing it now, too.”
“Darcie…” He stepped closer, then stopped, more than an arm’s length away.
“The only one you don’t do it to is your mother.”
Or maybe he had. Something clearly weighed on him, but rather than talking to his mother or someone else, he’d closed himself up here. An odd pain welled in her—a double-edged pain, both for him and caused by him.
“Darcie.”
He did whisper that. And he took another step toward her.
The silence around them abruptly shattered with heavy footfalls rapidly advancing down the hallway that intersected with the one they occupied.
Darcie had her flashlight out, holding it well to the side of her body, in case a desperado had dropped into the hallways of Drago High School.
The intruder turned the corner and headed right for them. She switched on the light and had two shocks, one minor, one not so.
The first was that the frozen-in-midstride intruder was Warren Wellton. That was the minor shock. If she’d listed people who might be in the high school building when they weren’t supposed to be, he’d make her top five.
The not-so-minor shock came from Zeke turning on his lantern only seconds after her flashlight came on, and then trying to put himself between her and Warren, as if to shield her.
“Stop that.” She sidestepped Zeke, keeping a clear view to Warren.
“Darcie?” The boy sounded as if his lips had gone numb.
“Yeah. What are you doing here, Warren?” He’d shown a moment of relief when he recognized her voice, but now guilt suffused his face. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing. I…I only—”
He spun around and ran as fast as Darcie had ever seen him move, back around the corner and out of the range of their lights. Apparently he felt being out of sight gave him safety because his footfalls stopped.
She spun around into the beam of Zeke’s lantern. “Don’t ever do that again, Zeekowsky. Ever. And don’t turn on your lamp in a situation like this unless you’re instructed to by the police officer.”
“I acted on instinct.” He clicked off his lantern.
“Well, don’t,” she said crossly. Could that be what he’d done this after
noon, too? No, that had been a calculated effort to shake off Cristina. “Now, let’s get out of here.”
She headed in the direction Warren had taken, intending to sweep him out of the building ahead of them. Zeke hadn’t moved.
“Darcie, I have something I want you to see.” He spoke in his full voice. The whisper, along with the moment, gone. “It’s back at the house—at Ma’s. Can you come by tonight when you’re off duty?”
“Zeke—”
“Please.”
“Fine. But you have to do something for me.”
“What?”
“Prove you’re not a ghost to a very spookable woman.”
After a night at bingo that Ma had characterized only with, “Bah!” she dozed off on the sofa watching TV, so when Zeke heard a car stop in front, he switched on the front porch light and went outside to meet Darcie.
“Hope you don’t mind staying out here,” he said after telling her his mother was asleep.
“Not at all. It’s a nice night. Warmed up a lot since Saturday.”
He hadn’t noticed. Had other things on his mind. He drew in a breath that held a spicy sweetness.
He held out a device balanced on his palm. “Here.”
“What am I supposed to do with your handheld?”
“Go on, take it.” He reached out, poking her with the fingertips of the hand holding the device. Finally, she took it. “It’s not my handheld. It’s a mock-up for a new device for police. It’s so you don’t have to write notes like you did about Mrs. Richards. Or dates and times of ghost sightings the way you did with Mildred tonight.”
She looked at him for what felt like several minutes before her gaze dropped to the small screen. She poked around on the keys.
Looking over her shoulder this way, he only had to turn his head to see the porch lamp’s glow glinting on the varied coloring of her shining hair. She’d taken it down now that she was off-duty, and the breeze stirred it, along with that subtle, spicy scent of hers that had fluttered at the edge of his consciousness. Finally, tonight, sitting in the chem lab, it had clicked into place.
At first he’d thought he was remembering. Then he realized she was there, and his pulse had rocketed.
“Multiple choice?”
“Yeah. It’ll save time to check which applies. Then you can file it, forward it or copy it to other people. You can select a reminder date to pop up.”
“All that’s great, Zeke. The reminders and being able to file and copy it, but there are too many variables.”
He nodded. “That’s why I added drop-down menus under these—see? It’s like a decision tree.”
“Those are your decisions. You’re forcing me into a mold. You can’t make my decisions. It needs to be simpler, Zeke.”
“But—”
“Did you hear about the big hospital out in California that instituted a computerized system? After a few months, the doctors rebelled. The machine couldn’t make the nuanced choices and decisions the doctors did. The machine constrained the doctors instead of helping them. The system was set up to be convenient for the system, not for the users.”
He looked at her a long time. Long enough to make her edgy, he saw. “You have a really good mind, Darcie Barrett.”
She blushed a little. “Thanks.”
“I mean it. You should meet Quince. He’s our VP of PR, but he’s also the one who keeps Vanessa and me aware of what customers really need. He and Brenda.” He considered that. “And a department of customer advocates Quince and Brenda instigated.”
Darcie chuckled. “Sounds like Quince’s somebody I’d like.”
He frowned. “You’re interested in Quince?”
“Interested? I haven’t even met him, remember?”
“Yeah, I know. I only thought…” He wasn’t sure what he’d thought. Except he hadn’t liked the idea of Darcie being interested in Quince. The logic that they’d never met hadn’t stood in the way of his not liking it.
Darcie picked up the handheld again. “What you should be doing, Zeke, is asking this consumer what she’d want from a gadget like this.”
“What would you want from a gadget like this?” he dutifully asked.
“Give me a place to write a note, then the options of what to do with it.”
He kept asking questions, digging and assessing, figuring out what she did and how he might make it easier for her.
“Stop! That’s enough, Zeke. You’ll go on with questions all night.”
“You always think you can figure out what I’ll do.”
“I’ve always been pretty good at reading people and I’ve honed the ability as a cop.” She spoke easily, but didn’t look at him. “You have to be able to anticipate what people are going to do.”
“Really?” He didn’t like her lumping him with people any more than he’d liked the idea of her being interested in Quince. And he didn’t like that she was good at reading everyone, while the best he could do was be partially literate with her alone. “Can you anticipate what I’m going to do now?”
He saw the knowledge in her eyes a second before he closed his own eyes and took her mouth.
She would have stepped back, but his hand had curved to cup her head, and his mouth came down on hers again. Now, instead of drawing away, she stepped into him, so the only thing between them was desire.
He’d thought that kissing her this afternoon was an impulse. Now the need went much deeper than any impulse.
Maybe back to a June night in his parents’ car. No, before that, because when he’d kissed her then, he’d found the need waiting for him, driving him.
But that was looking back, and he was a man who looked to the future. This was a future he’d been looking forward to for…it couldn’t be measured in time. Only longing.
Overhead, the porch light abruptly went out, wrapping them in intimate darkness at the same time it proclaimed his mother’s presence just inside the door, and her approval.
Zeke smiled, even as he kept kissing Darcie. She made a small protesting sound and might have thought to back away from him, but he remedied that by putting a hand to each side of her face and opening his mouth over hers.
He lined her lips with his tongue. Found an opening and stroked inside to the warmth and spice and heat that was Darcie.
She made a sound deep in her throat and leaned into him more, so he needed a half step back to balance them. With equilibrium regained, he consolidated the new closeness, backing her with one leg advanced between hers. He eased her up to the porch pole and pressed against her, no longer restricted by balance.
He felt the cushioning curves of her breasts against his chest, the welcoming hollow between her legs. He slid one hand down the back of her thigh, drawing it up, wanting to be closer, deeper.
She gasped. He stroked his tongue deeper, felt her hips rock once against his in answer.
Then she stilled. Only half a second, before she was twisting to the side, pushing against his chest enough so she could slide away.
“Wait. Wait. “
He reached for her. “Darcie—”
“No. Wait.” She half stumbled to the far side of the porch. “A minute.”
He followed. She was breathing hard. He liked knowing he’d caused that in her. He was breathing hard, too. He more than liked how she’d caused that reaction in him. He didn’t like how she held him off with an outstretched arm.
“I know it’s been sort of intense, coming back,” she finally said. “This afternoon, when you kissed me, and even, well, you know. Graduation. When we… There were a lot of emotions. Things get confusing in the middle of, uh, things. But there’s Jennifer, too.”
He hadn’t considered it particularly confusing until she stopped kissing him and started talking.
“Jennifer?”
“Look, I know—I knew then—how you felt about her. How you’ve always felt about her.”
“You mean in high school? Jennifer was an ideal. I never viewed you that way.”
&nbs
p; “Thank you very much.”
When they were kissing, the dark had wrapped them together. Now, with her out of his arms it became a barrier between them, masking expressions, making words harder. He drove his hand through his hair.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I meant…she wasn’t real. She didn’t exist for me, not as who she really was. She was only this image I had in my head. I never knew who she was as a person. I don’t think I cared. Not until I came back. Now I see she’s a nice woman with many fine qualities.”
“Yes, she is.”
“But she’s not you. You were never an image in my head, Darcie. You were always real.”
In the darkness he still thought he saw shock on her face. Then she spun away, the line of her shoulders straight and tense.
“Darcie, there’s something between us. There always has been. I can talk to you—you make me talk. And when we kiss—” He stepped close. “I don’t want to stop.”
She jerked around to face him. “This—we can’t. Unless—”
With his heart suspended—first by we can’t, then, no less suspended, but not quite so hopeless, by unless—he looked into her intense face.
“Unless what?”
Her words came out in such a rush he could barely separate them. “Zeke, this town needs your help. I’ve shown you every way I know how and now I’m asking—please, will you help Drago?”
His heart kicked back in, a stuttering, uneven pace.
He knew this moment. In developing any new product there were stops and starts, points with multiple possibilities, of going left, turning right, zigzagging or zooming straight up. There was also a decisive point to commit to one path in order to move forward. His gut told him when it was that moment, and which path to take.
This was that moment in an entirely different enterprise. But this time, his gut hadn’t declared the time. Darcie’s ultimatum had. We can’t. Unless. Unless he committed to bailing out the town he’d never wanted to see again.
He had to make a decision. And his gut was echoingly silent.
Chapter Seven
“I don’t owe this town anything.”
“I know that.”
Darcie kept her voice steady even though her insides felt like late night on the Fourth of July. Every once in a while an errant kaboom went off, reminding you both of the glory you’d seen, and that it had ended.
What Are Friends For? Page 12
